When I caught Beria after another meeting of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command, informed him of my and Lena's decision and asked him to be a witness at the marriage registration, the Commissar measured me with a long look, in which I read a whole gamut of emotions. Beria did not refuse, although he clearly had a bad suspicion about the reasons for my unexpected request. Yes, I think it was not even suspicion, it was absolute certainty. In any case, in the registry office he looked at Lena a little too intently, but she just smiled sweetly and pretended not to notice anything.
The registry clerk seemed to worry the most during our marriage registration. Comrade Beria's appearance made an indelible impression on her. I didn't tell Lena anything beforehand either, only warning her that something unexpected was waiting for her. The surprise was a success.
“What did you do, Nagulin!?” Lena said to me right after we were alone. “Why did you bring him as a witness? He knew right away! Now he knows that I told you everything about the recruitment and about my mission.”
“Naturally, he understood it all. And I am really grateful to him for the fact that voluntarily or involuntarily he contributed to the beginning of our relationship. And it's very good that Beria knows all about it now, although I think he guessed it anyway. There won't be any consequences for you, you'll see. Well, except that no one else would want reports from you about my behavior and mindset. You see, it turns out that we ourselves informed your superiors that you told me everything. Unofficially, but we did. If we didn't, you'd have to keep pretending that you're on a mission for the NKVD and spying on your own husband. It would have been a very bad deception that would have come out sooner or later, and then the consequences would have been really hard to foresee. But as it was…”
“Yeah, you're probably right,” Lena smiled and took my hand. “I didn't look at the situation from that point of view. It all makes a lot of sense, and it's probably really better that way. The People's Commissariat gave me a whole day's leave on the occasion of my marriage, so let's at least forget about the war and everything connected with it for a while.”
Naturally, I did not object.
We arrived at Novorossiysk in the evening. Mekhlis immediately demanded to be delivered to the front headquarters, and I, without delay, went to the location of my air regiment. I didn't give a damn about the Army Commissar's leering looks. Every operation of mine traditionally started with night air reconnaissance, and Colonel Kudryavtsev was already waiting at the airfield, having given orders to prepare the Pe-3 twin-engine fighter for the flight in advance. Mekhlis will obviously find something to do at the front headquarters. No doubt he will send a telegram to Stalin today about how horribly everything is organized here and how the front leadership is not in control of the situation, has lost the initiative and does not know where his troops are. And, naturally, he will mention in this telegram my inadequate behavior. Instead of tightening the screws on the slackers here, the boy Major General went off to fly a plane… Let it be. The main thing is that he doesn't shoot anyone there in a fit of temper, but I don't think it will come to that – I'll be back in the middle of the night from the reconnaissance flight.
Following the plane in which Mekhlis and I arrived, two PS-84 transport planes landed at the airfield. Perfectly aware of the nature of the problems I was to face in the Crimea, I requested from the Leningrad Front the equipment and specialists with whom we were setting up air defense fire control system to repel the massive Luftwaffe raid. The situation on the Kerch Peninsula and Sevastopol Defense District was in many ways similar to the situation in the besieged city of Leningrad. Even the battleship Paris Commune was of the same type as the Marat and the October Revolution. Here, however, it was only one, but the 30th Battery in Sevastopol consisted of two gun turrets removed from the exact same battleship Mikhail Frunze, which could not be restored after a major fire that happened back in 1919. It was a remarkable coincidence. In Leningrad I also had at my disposal a Sevastopol-class battleship and, in fact, a fixed three-tower battery, which the Marat turned into after being hit by a heavy armor-piercing bomb.
Using the experience of Leningrad and the specialists who had already undergone the necessary practical training, I hoped to quickly enough organize in the Crimea a unified system of fire control of the major caliber of warships and guns of coastal batteries. The 305mm fuel-air shells were now also on their way to Novorossiysk by special train. Unfortunately, only 200 of them were produced in time, as production was focused mainly on 203 mm caliber, which was suitable for the B-4 howitzers. Nevertheless, I was really counting on this ammunition. The Kerch Peninsula was not so big, and the guns of the Sevastopol-class battleship could shoot through it, also they could reach as far into the Crimean territory as 30 kilometers from the coast and almost 40 kilometers from the towers of the coastal batteries of Sevastopol.
We flew over the Crimea, immersed in the darkness of night. Kudryavtsev was silent, trying not to distract me from my observations, he only occasionally adjusted the course in the control points. In the mountainous terrain not all details were clearly visible from the satellites, and sometimes I would order the Colonel to descend a little and fly over the areas I was interested in again. By and large we could have done without it, but since we flew for reconnaissance anyway, I wanted this flight to be of some real use, apart from eliminating unnecessary questions about how I knew so much about the location of enemy units and formations.
Manstein was not considered one of Hitler's best commanders for nothing. He was moving his troops and equipment purposefully, and every day his plan was becoming clearer to me. Previously the escape pod computer and my homemade analysis program only partly helped me in predicting the enemy's actions, but now Letra unfolded before me the Germans' plans in every detail. Drones were invisibly present at 11th Army headquarters, transmitting map shots, copies of orders, transcripts of telephone conversations and radio intercepts.
Taking advantage of their dominance in the air, the Germans conducted a thorough air reconnaissance. They knew almost everything about the group of Soviet troops opposing them. Manstein, who had received at his disposal Richthofen's 4th Air Fleet and had brought a considerable force of heavy artillery to Feodosiya, planned to squeeze everything possible out of the reconnaissance data in the initial phase of the operation.
In an effort to break deep into Crimea, Lieutenant-General Kozlov concentrated two-thirds of his forces on the northern section of the front, adjacent to the coast of the Sea of Azov. The southern section was occupied by a relatively weak force, covering Feodosiya and not taking active offensive actions. The command of the Crimean Front believed that the Germans would not risk an offensive along the Black Sea coast, fearing the heavy guns of the Black Sea Fleet ships, but Manstein reasoned otherwise. He decided to take advantage of the relative weakness of the southern section of the Soviet front and succeed by using the effect of surprise, based on the fact that the Russians were not expecting a strike in the south.
With only one panzer division at his disposal, the German commander decided not to break his tank fist into pieces, but rather to use a strategy that mirrored his plan to capture France in miniature – break through the Soviet defense in a weak area and turn north to hit the flank and rear of the stronger grouping of Soviet troops with tanks, intercepting its supply lines and smashing the rear. This plan was not bad and, frankly, it had every chance of success, so if I wanted to prevent the disaster that was looming over the Crimean front, I had to act without delay.
By the time I arrived at the front headquarters, Mekhlis had already been diligently addressing the command staff for several hours. Without meeting worthy resistance, the Army Commissar explained to Kozlov and his subordinates the essence and meaning of military duty, he censured them in every way for their indecision in the face of the enemy and their inability to inflict a crushing blow with all their available forces. Everything was clearly heading toward urgent preparations for a new offensive, and judging by the generals' faces, they had already resigned themselves to the inevitable.
Seeing me, Mekhlis could not contain his annoyance. My arrival seemed to have prevented him from making a fervent speech on a moral-political subject, to which he was about to move on from purely military matters. However, the Army Commissar